Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  “Once, I stood beneath the bright sun all-seeing, beside the wine-dark sea. The Sybil of the Serpent-Shrine at Dolphins, she said that there is a land beyond the fields of Asphodel: Father Time, Chronos, would perish, and the Eternal Universe, Ouranos, will halt the turning of the years. The grate of Hades would be stove in, and the shades made flesh again. All lovers would be reunited.”

  Mneseus was a very dignified-looking fellow, polite and grim in the way soldiers who have seen too much combat often have. Even jolly little Huc-huc Pounce (back before the dire-worms took him) had not been able to make Mneseus laugh. He dated from somewhere older than 4000 B.C.

  Abraxander-the-Threshold had conjured him a voluminous white mantle, which he wore draped over his chest and arms like you might see in classical sculpture.

  His shirt was linen and his leather skirt was hemmed with gold pebbles. Shields or plates of bronze and oxhide hung over his chest and back: there were shining greaves on his calves, and he wore a leather sleeve on his right arm to protect it from the bowstring.

  His helm was of a design that looked strangely modern to me: it looked like a flat pie-plate of bronze, tied in a complex tangle with two ribbons under and around his chin. Atop the helmet was a coronet of white poplar leaves, tied with purple ribbon. He had insisted Abraxander create for him a flask of oil, with which he anointed his limbs, so that they shone: he seemed to think this more important than his tunic or mantle or skirt.

  A small cylindrical quiver of metal hung over one shoulder, and his arrows clashed when he ran. He was the swiftest afoot of all of us, fleeter even than He-Sings-Death.

  The bow shot silvery arrows tipped with ampoules of glass and metal. There was some sort of magic or forgotten science to arrowheads, for he had to prepare them or charge them with an amber rod he wore at his belt. When the arrows were charged, there was a smell like summer lightning in the air. When he shot a monster with an arrow, even the smallest wound would make the monster dance and leap, limbs jerking, and drop dead.

  Was it an electrical charge of some sort? I kept expecting a flash of lightning or a thunderclap to come from the flying shafts of the wizard from Atlantis, but it never came. When he strung his bow, there was just a silent sense of pressure in the air, like you feel before a thunderstorm.

  Mneseus held the bow unstrung now, and he was seated on the edge of a machine casing, but his posture was kingly, and the bowstaff in his hand seemed a scepter.

  Mneseus looked up at He-Sings-Death, and stared him eye to eye, and called out in a ringing voice: “Now is the time, is it not? Now is the hour when Ouranos, who created Cosmos from Chaos, returns from exile to claim his kingdom, and end the tyranny of Time, his wicked son. And—? And—?”

  He lowered his bow staff and waved it left and right, pointing to one side of the chamber, and the other. I looked. There were tall square shapes, like abandoned machines, things that looked like dull tall mirrors, and, in the center of the room, the very wide sunken amphitheatre of chairs, all facing the floor of glass. There was that mysterious light shining from the sunken glass floor in the center of the chamber.

  “I see her not,” He said at last, dropping his hand.

  I said, “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but for whom would you be looking?”

  He looked at me. His eyes were tilted, like the eyes of a Chinaman, but the pupils were silvery, a color I had never seen in a human before.

  He said softly, “My queen, the witch Parthenope. She repented of her crimes, freed the maidens of her tower, and consented to age and die as other women do. She threw her bowl where she mixed poisons into the sea, though the hag-goddess of the dark of the moon was angered at her for her ingratitude. My queen used her wisdom thereafter to heal the sick, and to calm the storms at sea. When she perished, a pine tree grew up upon her grave. The augurs told me this was a sign of everlasting life. A halcyon nested in the branches.

  “Where is she?” Mneseus continued. “All lovers are to be reunited at the end of time. Now is the Eschaton. Where is my wife?”

  The voice of Mneseus was heavy with grief.

  He-Sings-Death still menaced him with his javelin.

  I said to He-Sings-Death, “Mr. Singer, you told us the devil cannot weep, but His Majesty clearly has been. Put down the weapon, and let us use our wits to find the traitor here.”

  He-Sings-Death hesitated.

  Mneseus looked at him with contempt. “Strike, then, barbarian, and rid this iron hell of one more grieving soul. What care I for your suspicions? None are worthy to stand in judgment over me. Strike! And pierce my heart: it is pained with weeping, and no more to be called a man's heart. Where, O Hercules! Where is my virtue gone?”

  All at once he stood, put his sandal to his bow, bent and strung it. In one smooth motion he snatched an arrow from his quiver, touched it to the amber at his belt, fit it to the string, and raised the bow and drew the string back to his ear. The room throbbed with an unseen power: I smelled lighting in the air.

  He pointed the arrow at He-Sings-Death. “You stood idle while my shining hands strung my death-bestowing bow, which slays men. Why did you allow me? That was folly.”

  He-Sings-Death smiled, but his voice shook. He had seen what the arrows of Mneseus could do.

  The painted Cave Man said, “Three spirits made the world: He-Knows-All, He-Gives-Gifts, He-Spares-Men. He-Spares-Men has told us that it is wrong to kill a brother. But I do not know what you are! Are you a man who eats flesh cooked with fire, as other men do? Or are you the serpent hidden with us? If you are not the serpent hidden with us, why did you say poison words into my ear about Captain Powell, He-Holds-Iron-Thunder?”

  Because of the strain of holding the bowstring taut, Mneseus could only speak through clenched teeth. “Hah! Is mine eye the only open eye here? None other has seen it. Enough! I am not your tutor, barbarian. I am armed, and you have taken weapons up against me. Will you strike now? Or else I let fly!”

  I said, “Your Majesty, you seem to know things, even what a person is thinking before he speaks. Are you a mind-reader? Is there someone among us who is not thinking like a human being?”

  Mneseus said, “My daemon speaks to me. Why were you spared? I saw the Cold Hand pluck men up from your left and right. I saw the Pyramid pass over you. I saw the envenomed snow fall softly on the faces of the men. But not on your face. Always, always, men die to the side left of you, and to the right, and before you and behind, but you are spared. They do not smite you. Have you taken their coin?”

  I said, “Ydmos said the traitor might be possessed without the traitor himself knowing it. Might it be me?”

  Mneseus now swung to turn the bow toward me. I smelled ozone.

  He said through clenched teeth. “A cold hand touches my neck. There is a ker among us, sleeping, perhaps, like a dragon coiled in the bottom of the belly. From time to time, it stirs, but it does not wake. It is near: perhaps it is in me. Or you! Do you understand me? You yourself, Pwyll, said it might be you, but unknown to you. So it might be of any of us. There is one solution. The door is open.”

  “Door? What door?”

  The muscles in his arm were trembling, but the arrowhead was steady, and he did not relax his draw. Mneseus hissed: "The door through which we were pulled to come from there to here. The door the fifty-headed hound must guard.”

  Ydmos said softly, “He means the Capsule.”

  The words did not mean much to me, but something in his tone made a shiver go up my spine.

  I said, “With three mind-readers here, we cannot figure out which one of us is inhabited by this – this thing?”

  Mneseus said sharply, “This is no riddle for us to puzzle over and solve! There is no solving of this, only ending! It lives in one of us. When we all slay ourselves, it dies, and whatever it had hoped or planned for us to do, whatever dark purpose moved this thing to break us from our deadly graves, that hope is dashed, that purpose is no more.”

  The arrowhead was less than two yards fr
om me. The bowstring creaked under the tension.

  When Mneseus swung his arrow to cover me, I raised my rifle to my shoulder, but I did not point it away from my previous target. I did not want to shoot from the hip a weapon that had so much kick.

  132. The Blue Man

  I had been very casual. When I had said my piece the Blue Man made tools from his fluid. But, when I turned my head and directed the conversation towards Kitimil, I had not turned my barrel away from the Blue Man.

  Only after a moment of silence did the Blue Man look up to notice that I was pointing my barrel at him. He raised an eyebrow.

  The man from AD 11,000 was as blue as a peacock’s neck, and highlights of purple, cyan, and jade shimmered through his skin substance when he moved. The Blue Man was reclining, leaning with one hand—chalk-blue on the palm, Prussian blue on the back of his hand—against his smooth plum-colored cheek.

  His eyes were half-closed. In his other hand, he held a long-stemmed pipe of clay, like something a leprechaun would smoke, but in the bowl of the pipe was some luminous liquid that fluttered like a butterfly with wings of flame, and a weft of acrid smolder crept upward from the bowl.

  He came from a dark age between the first and second eras of space flight, when mankind engaged in a thousand years of war with giant things living on the Moon, creatures once men, descended from exiled space-farers, who had grown strange and terrible during their generations-long voyaging to haunted worlds; beings who, in the weightless void, had grown enormous.

  “Ah, me," he drawled in a voice of casual disdain. “And what might this poor son of Old Earth have done to lure the sniffs and blinks and pointy-fingers of our brave Boom-stick-shooter here? He is so proud of his chemical explosives, his surface-dimensional thinking, his pre-conflux cortex. I am merely an Adept of the Mind Core, a Ninth-Rank adept of the Excellent rating: whereas he extinguishes meaty beasts for sport, not to eat. What do I do to earn the honor of his suspicion?”

  I said, “You will forgive me, sir, but you have complimented the enemy once too often to make your loyalty to mankind a matter safe to take for granted.”

  Mneseus, who could not maintain the tension on his bow for so long, relaxed his grip, and lowered his bow: but he kept his eye on me, and kept the arrow ready on the string. Some of the tension went out of He-Sings-Death, but he kept his flint-tipped spear pointed toward Mneseus. Mneseus kept his eyes on me, and He-Sings-Death on Mneseus, but both men listened to what Crystals-of-Bliss was saying.

  He was saying: “They are a more efficient form of organization, and even those that are not alive, they replicate, they spread, they consume. They thrive in this present environment, a dark cosmos where the stars have died, and all particles of matter start to fray. How long have they reigned? How many billions of years? A higher form than us, as we are higher than mere germs that make us sick.” He held up his powder-blue palm. “This bath-born son of Old Earth will cheer for the sickness called humanity, this time. Why not?”

  “Sir," I said, “The turtle will outlive a man, as will a Redwood tree; the elephant is stronger, the tiger is more swift, and the lion more majestic. Nature arms us with but feeble tooth and claw; clothes us with hides fragile and naked to the cold and wet; equips us with a nose duller than a dog's, and an eye more night-blind than a cat's. The enemy is stronger than man, and wiser, and older: but so is the devil himself.”

  “Devils, are they, then, you think? Is that the science of your awkward old-time age now speaking up, my poppet?”

  I said, “With all due respect, I was more skeptical of claims about the afterlife before I was resurrected from the dead. If these are not black fiends from Hell, they'll do until the real ones come.”

  The Blue Man said, “Ooh, that would be comforting, my pets, to know the universe cared about me and mine enough to hate us all! The cosmos is not alive: it is merely processes in motion. Stars do not twinkle to make us smile; runaway disease-mold does not eat worlds to make us cry. Smiles are a tug of muscles in the cheek: tears are salty water in the eye.”

  The Blue Man was a smooth-shaven youth with the improbable name of Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss Segment Version Seven. He had also been normal-looking before Abraxander had equipped us. Now his skin was dyed blue and hair on his head was a freakish chalk-white. The stubble on his cheeks had vanished, though I had not seen him shave.

  (Neither, by the way, did Ydmos shave. Despite his silver hair, Ydmos was a strong young man, but no hair grew on his cheek. Enoch had black ringlets surrounding his full, red-lipped mouth, and he trimmed his beard into a rough square with his meat-cleaver, and he joked that the blade had no other good use.)

  The Blue Man, back when he had been dusky and dark like a Spaniard, had asked Abraxander for flasks of bluish liquid that flowed sluggishly like molten glass. Only if you looked quite close, could you see the liquid was actually a mass of swarming midges, or mites; and even these mites you would see with your eye were fabrications, made out of the substances suspended in the gel by even smaller mites.

  Unlike my rifle, which had taken three sleep-periods to solidify, his flasks had turned solid within an hour or two. The Blue Man drank the damn stuff, rubbed some of it in his hair, rolled it between his fingers like a child playing with fast-drying library paste.

  He took it like snuff, wiped it into his eyes and ears, and, for all I know, rubbed it up his bunghole.

  After that, his skin turned blue, and he grew himself a garment (if it can be called that), out of his skin cells. He shed his skin like a snake and then wrapped it back over himself as a skin-tight sheath.

  Why shed your skin in the first place if you are just going to put it back on again? The garment was an oily material where he could make hues appear. Crystals-of-Bliss was smart enough to copy the camouflage idea from the armor of Ydmos, and kept his chameleon cloth turned to an unobtrusive dull pewter.

  Many rows of tiny little pockets, looking almost like fishes scales, ran up and down the arms and legs and chest, giving a texture to the strange material, and here and there I saw a glint of wire or a bead of jet, and I wondered what they were. Ornamentation? I doubted it. I suspect his projection-tube was merely a toy: these electric circuits were his real weapons.

  He said, “Is this, all this, merely Human versus Other? I suspect not. But say that this bath-born Ninth-rank Excellent is just as rah-rah, just as filled with patriot's delight, as our fine Captain Powell of Nantucket, unmodified baseline human, no-rank, born from a woman's womb like the beasts his age exterminated. But say it is so. Are you sure we should hate these creatures? Don't you know who they are?”

  He looked around at us. He smiled a half-cocked smile and leaned back, taking and slow draw on his pipe, and letting the smolder waft from his grin. “This bath-born knows. Am I the only one whose brain matter matters?” He watched the plume of purple smoke trickle upwards toward the ceiling.

  I said, “Forgive me, sir, but again you speak with admiration of the horrors who have annihilated all but eight of us. These things, whatever they are, these horrors are the enemy of all mankind….”

  He laughed a bitter laugh. “What is man? Matter in motion. Meaningless atoms.” Then he pointed his pipe-stem at Abraxander. “Go ahead, gray-hair. Go ahead, you womb-born biomass. Tell them what you told me. You know where we are. Who built this place?”

  133. The Matter-Wizard

  Abraxander-the-Threshold dated from about AD 30,000, and came from the Earth-sized moon of a superjovian-sized world circling a double star in the constellation Cetus.

  His people, at one time, had ruled the planet, but their atmosphere-equipment, over the generations, had failed, and the poisonous air native to the planet, the poisonous grasses and sea microbes, had returned. Of the hundreds of cities and domed villages of his world, only nine cities, in his time, remained.

  Back when we had first emerged, wet and shaking from the rebirth coffins in the Archive, Abraxander seemed no stranger than any other man there. He had been
naked, like us.

  Of the million who fled the burning Archive chamber, I knew that only we survived, unless the other groups had had one like Abraxander among them. Our band had fled to what I took to be the Engineering Deck. While we waited, Abraxander said that the giant sarcophagi shapes looming along the back wall were “non-continuity” engines. He “sensed” that the oblongs still had a memory—he called it a “formation-ghost”—of the engine’s original ability to break through the walls of time and space. With that power, he made materials for us: arms, clothing, food.

  He reminds me of my old headmaster at Bramingham: the same condescending, dry, infinitely patient tones. Not long ago, he tried very gamely to explain his art to me, which he insists is not magic (“The materialization is accomplished by polydimensional geometry: an axis rotates eidetic forms out of mind and into matter: the formality collects substance along the time-axis, so that to these ones, us, the process appears to take time…”) until I begged him to stop.

  His own clothing reminded me of something between a Turk and a storybook wizard: his hat was a fez or a dunce-cap, he wore a puff-shouldered black jacket set with silver clasps, and a pair of pantaloons so balloon-legged that it looked like a lady’s riding habit, or the skirt of a Japanese fencer. His sleeves were so blousy and long that he had to tuck them into his sash. On his nose he wore a silver clasp set with pearls, as if a pair of pince-nez glasses had been shorn of their glass, leaving only the nosepiece.

  His civilization had been the last period of three aeons of star-faring. His original home-era was so far in the future as to be unimaginable to me. And yet, even at that, it was less than one eight-hundredth of the time dividing my time from the home-era of Ydmos of the Last Redoubt.